Cardinal Baronius also wrote that the pope at the time
decreed that the statue be destroyed but some say the local archbishop didn't
want a good to statue go to waste. "The statue was transformed,"
believes Cross. "I mean, literally, it was scraped off, her name and
written on top of Pope Zachary." At the Basilica in St. Peter's Square are
8 images/carvings by Bernini, one of the most famous artists of the 17th
century, of a woman wearing a papal crown and seemingly telling the story of a
woman giving birth. Medieval manuscripts tell a similar tale: Pope Joan was in
the midst of a papal procession, a 3-mile trip to the Church of the Lateran in
Rome, when suddenly at a crossroads she was having a baby, the stories say.
Malone said "And then the story gets very confused, because some of the
records say she was killed and her child was killed right on the spot. Other
records say she was sent to a convent and that her son grew up and later became
bishop of Ostia" -- but in most accounts, Pope Joan perished that day. In
the decades that followed, the intersection (Colosseum and St.
Clement) was called the Vicus Papissa -- the Street of the Female Pope -- and
for more than 100 years popes would take a detour to avoid the shameful
intersection. Polonus wrote: "The Lord Pope always turns aside from the
street ... because of the abhorrence of the event." Valerie Hotchkiss, a
professor of medieval studies at Southern Methodist University in Texas, said
that the story of Pope Joan was actually added to Martin Polonus' manuscript
after he died. "So he didn't write it but it was put in very soon after
his death, like around 1280 to 1290…And everyone picks it up from Martin
Polonus." Medieval monks were like copy machines, say some scholars,
simply replicating mistakes into the historical record. "And they're
picking it up from each other and changing it and embellishing it"
Hotchkiss said. Monsignor Charles Burns, the former head of the Vatican secret
archives, said there is no evidence and no documentation in the secret archives
that Pope Joan existed, no relic of Pope John Anglicus anywhere. Others say the
Bernini sculptures were modeled after the niece of the pope and the Vicus
Papissa was named for a woman who lived in the area. According to the Catholic
Encyclopedia Anastasius Bibliothecarius (born around
810 and died in 879) was Librarian to the Church and attended the last session
(February 870) of the 8th Oecumenical Council in Constantinople; he had most of the
declarations of obedience of the Greek bishops and a copy of the
"Acts" which he translated into Latin.
Anastasius did several works that were accepted by the Church and several
letters written by him have been preserved but the Church does not accept (same
as in April 14 blog-Christ & Apostle Peter) the
Liber Pontificalis saying - This
manuscript, in the Vatican
Library, bears the relevant passage inserted as a footnote at the bottom of a
page. It is out of sequence, and in a different hand, one that dates from after
the time of Martin of Opava. This "witness" to the female Pope is
likely to be based upon Martin's account and not a possible source for it. The
same is true of Marianus Scotus’ Chronicle
of the Popes written in the 11th century. Some manuscripts of it
contain a brief mention of a female Pope but all these manuscripts are later
than Martin's work and earlier manuscripts do not contain the legend. Protestants
John Wycliff and Jan Huss both used her as examples of the failings of the
College of Cardinals and accused the church of hiding the truth (over 40 pamphlets
were dedicated to the subject of Pope Joan during the Reformation). At his 1415 trial Huss argued that the Church does not
necessarily need a Pope because during the Pontificate of "Pope
Agnes" (as he also called her) it got on quite well; his opponents
insisted that his argument proved no such thing about the independence of the
Church but they did not dispute that there had been a female Pope; it’s
said that after Huss’s execution in 1415 the Catholic Church began to deny that
Joan had ever existed. Scholars say there were many women martyrs in that era and
women who became saints while cross-dressing as monks. St. Eugenia, for
example, became a monk while disguised as a boy and was so convincing she was
brought to court on charges of fathering a local woman's child; she finally
proved her innocence only by baring her breasts in public. "There are over
30 saints' lives in which women dress as men for a variety of reasons and with
a variety of outcomes" said Hotchkiss. These powerful women could have
inspired a so-called crackdown by the church after AD 1000 as it consolidated
its ranks and reaffirmed the rules on celibacy among its priests (15 were sexually active before becoming pope and it’s
claimed that 12 were sexually active during their papacies; no pope since 1585 is
known to have been sexually active during his papacy; the Catholic Church
considers the abuses grave and a cause of scandal but does not undermine the
Catholic doctrines). One school of thought says the story of Pope Joan
was invented as a lesson to women: Don't even think about reaching for power or
you will end up like her -- exposed and humiliated. Another school argues that
it was the fear of female power that led the church to essentially expunge Pope
Joan from history. And, what about the enormous purple marble chair on which
popes once sat as they were crowned; it has a strange opening, something like a
toilet seat, reportedly used to check whether the pope had testicles-David
Dawson Vasquez, the director of Catholic University of America's Rome program,
said "Because it's elaborate, it's purple. It was the most expensive
marble of Roman times and so it was only used for the emperor. "The hole
is there because it was used by the imperial Romans, perhaps as a toilet,
perhaps as a birthing chair. It doesn't matter if there's a hole there because
you can still sit there and be crowned." Others say it was a symbol of the
pope giving birth to the mother church and so it was hidden from view; the last
relic in the tale of Pope Joan is withdrawn. Coincidences or not; it seems the
Church may once again be afraid of women.
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